From the Fringe: ‘Third Time Lucky’

You want to like Paul Hutcheson’s show; you really, really do. He’s cute, he’s expressive, and he has a funny way of repeating things for emphasis, louder and louder, as if his listeners are either imbeciles or dogs.

“We’re gonna read, and you’re gonna like it,” he says to a classroom full of teenage miscreants, and by the time he’s said it five or six times, you believe him.

But Hutcheson is missing his material in Third Time Lucky, the hour-long solo act that he apparently performed for the very first time Thursday night. The show sees things in threes, sort of: There’s a trio of bad jobs, a trio of statements about porn, a trio of sex-related stories. (The audience is supposed to pick one, but he winds up telling all three of them; not a one is especially entertaining.)

Hutcheson seems to think he has led a charmed life, and maybe he has – although whether you agree probably depends on how eager you would be to participate in a gay orgy, which is his proof of the pudding here. I tend to think his luck goes like this: You still like him, even though he has no show.